Trails: the backbone of your place

This is the first thing to set up, and the one that makes everything else useful. A task attaches to a trail. A condition describes a trail. A checklist campaign runs across trails. The time report breaks down by trail.

Until your trails are in Sentinel, the rest works — but only halfway.

Where: left navigation bar, under Administration → Trails.

A trail belongs to one activity

The section starts by asking which activity. Mountain biking, hiking, cross-country skiing: each has its own trails, and a trail belongs to exactly one activity.

That is what lets a multi-activity place keep its networks separate. A member restricted to skiing will never see the biking trails — but that separation comes from the member's activities, not from the trail itself.

Importing your tracks

You don't draw a trail by hand in Sentinel. You import it.

You can select several files at once. Each becomes a trail, attached to the activity you're currently in. A progress message follows you through the import.

Where do those files come from? Your watch or GPS tracking app, a survey done by a consultant, or an export from whatever tool you used before. Most mapping platforms export GPX.

The search at the top filters the list by name — handy once a network passes thirty trails.

A trail's page

Click a row to open it.

The name is what your field teams see, in task lists and in the checklist matrix. Use the name people actually say, not the internal code.

The description is optional. Use it for what the track can't tell you: "wet rock after rain", "closed in spring".

The difficulty comes from the list you configure in its own section. Its colour is the trail's visual landmark everywhere else — on maps, in the kanban, in the checklist matrix.

As everywhere in the app, nothing applies until you hit Save, and you're stopped if you try to leave with unsaved edits.

Fixing a track

A trail got rerouted, or the original survey was rough? The Update track section replaces the geometry without touching the rest: the name, description, difficulty and — most importantly — the tasks already attached all stay put.

Three errors come up often at import time:

"Multiple trails found in the file" — your GPX holds several tracks. Split them into separate files, or use the multi-file import from the list.

"No trail found in the file" — the file only holds waypoints, no track. Common when you export favourites rather than a route.

"File format not supported" — Sentinel reads GPX, KML and KMZ. A .fit or .tcx file has to be converted first.

Deleting a trail

This is the action that deserves the most care. The confirmation says it plainly:

This action will permanently delete this trail and all associated tasks. This cannot be undone.

In other words: deleting a trail erases the history of the work done on it. If the trail was simply closed or renamed, edit it rather than deleting it.

A single trail is deleted from its own page, at the bottom.

Working on several trails at once

From the list, tick the checkbox at the start of each row. As soon as one trail is ticked, the top of the screen changes: the search box gives way to the number of selected trails, Cancel, Edit, and Delete trails.

Three shortcuts are worth knowing:

• The checkbox at the top of the table selects every trail on screen — those of the current activity, and only those your search leaves visible.
• Shift + click on a second checkbox selects the whole range between the two, like in a spreadsheet.
• Clicking a trail's name still opens its page: ticking and opening are two separate gestures.

If you switch activity or change your search, the selection clears. That's deliberate: you don't act on rows you can no longer see.

Editing the selection

Edit opens a short form with two fields: activity and difficulty.

Each field has a switch. While it is off, the field is left alone — that is what lets you change the difficulty of thirty trails without saying anything about their activity. Turn on only what you mean to overwrite, then hit Apply.

This is the cleanup tool: thirty trails imported in one go all arrive with the same difficulty, and this is where you spread them out without opening thirty pages.

Be careful with the activity change: it doesn't just move the trail, it takes its tasks along. The trail then leaves the list you're in, since it now belongs to another activity.

Deleting the selection

The confirmation reminds you how many trails are involved, and the warning is unchanged: the attached tasks go with them. This is the kind of action you take after a botched import or during an end-of-season cleanup, not day to day.

Who can do what

You need write access to Trails & Configuration to import, edit or delete. In read-only, trails stay visible — they have to be, since tasks and maps refer to them — but the action buttons disappear.

That's also why this right raises itself when you grant Tasks or Structures in a role: you can't work on tasks without seeing the trails they attach to.

Two pieces of advice

Import everything, then clean up. It is faster to import all your tracks and fix the names afterwards than to import them one at a time, polishing each.

Settle your difficulties before importing. Difficulty drives the colour, and the colour is what your team reads on the map. Setting the list up first saves you a pass over thirty trails.